There are no mandates inside the gates of Eden

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones has done the yeoman's work of compiling videos of the leading tea party protest songs.

One is struck by the extreme literalism of the lyrics -- lots of rhymes of "liber-tee" and "tyra-nee" and things like that. I should note that the right doesn't have a monopoly on this sort of drab tendentiousness. At the risk of incurring the wrath of many of my British readers, I often Billy Bragg's lyrics to be a lot less like song lyrics than like ideological sermons.

Makes me wonder, if the tea party really had a poet among its ranks -- and who knows, maybe it does -- what his or her lyrics would look like. Dylan wrote, to take an obvious example, "How many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned?" What might the t.p. variant of that be? My headline on this post offers a modest suggestion, for you Dylanites.

A good protest song or political song needs to strike the right balance between excessive literalism and total obscurantism. Tilting toward the latter end, perhaps unsurprisingly, was John Lennon. No, I don't mean "Revolution."

It's a little known fact that "Come Together" was written as a possible slogan and theme song for Timothy Leary's 1970 candidacy for governor of California. The chorus works well enough, I suppose, and indeed, "Come Together" was in fact the slogan of Leary's campaign.

But the verses weren't particularly helpful in terms of elucidating Leary's platform, as he was not calling for higher taxes on all those Golden Staters with ju-ju eyeballs, and I believe the association was shelved after a time.